The Effects of Regulation of Agricultural Support on the Planting Structure in Békés County and the Spread of Set-Aside of Arable Land

Békés County has good agricultural qualities: one of these important qualities is the high quality arable land. Almost the whole area of the county is used for arable farming. Apart from the high-quality crops it is important that high production rates are typical in this area. Due to these factors, set-aside was not common practice and was only were used where crop rotation and agrotechnics required it.
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) called Agenda2000 already suggested the requirement of set-aside, however, it was not used by Hungarian farmers for years in practice.
The latest reform generated by the CAP has brought many new requirements for farmers related to the payment of agricultural support. Among these are the spectrum of greening requirements. During our research, we examined the land using data in the county from 2009 to 2016.
We analysed the statistics from the perspective of area-data and use of land. We determined that in the general crop rotation of the farms, the area of a few main crops was typically decreased and plant diversification in agricultural areas grew, the ratio of set-aside lands significantly increased to the „disadvantage” of cultivars. It is apparent that due to the latest CAP reforms planting structure has changed a great deal in the county in the past eight years.